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Today my role on the NIH funded project on Ecological Emerging Infectious Diseases (EEID), moves to Cornell university. Based in Dr Scott McArts Lab, i will be leading the considerable molecular and bioinformatic work on this $2 million NIH grant focusing on the spread of infectious microbial organisms in wild bees.

As I mentioned in the earlier post upon receiving the funding, this is a large collaborative project and my hope is that it will make large strides in helping us understand the drivers of parasite spread in bees, and therefore let us identify ways to reduce parasite spread.

One of the first things i’m doing is collecting wild flowers and bees and observing pollinator behaviour within the complex flower-pollinator networks at the sample sites.

Here, I look at the microbiomes in wild and managed bees. Microbiomes are the communities of microbes that live in the digestive tract of bees. We believe many of these microbes provide benefits to the host bee; and honey bees in particular are known to have a consistent community of microbes. However, research of the honey bee microbiome can only provide limited insight into wild bees. By looking at the microbiomes in the closely related Ceratina bees and distantly related Megalopta we examine how different the microbiomes are between different bees. We then look to see if the microbes found in the bee collected pollen is similar to the microbiomes.

This is particularly interesting in the Ceratina pollen which is provisioned in brood cells in sequence so we could link it to its time since being regurgitated by the bee

Unlike honey bees, whose gut microbial community differs compared to their pollen, Ceratina adults and pollen largely share a similar microbial composition. This suggests the environmental transmission of microbes from flowers is likely to be important for wild bees like Ceratina who do not benefit from social transmission like honeybees do. We go on to discuss the consequences of diversity in core microbiota between bee genera and their associations with pollen in relation to identifying potentially beneficial microbial taxa in wild bees to aid the conservation of wild, understudied, non- model bee species.

The Publishing group Elsevier today notified me that my that work published back in 2013 is one of the most highly cited (top 5) within their journal of invertebrate Pathology over the period of publication to June 2016.

-According to Google scholar, the article has been cited 55 times. The article was written in collaboration with undergraduate student Kathryn Yates, plus Ben Darvill from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and my PhD supervisors Dave Goulson and William O.H. Hughes. It describes how we identified the parasite, Nosema ceranae in wild bumblebees in the UK. We go on to test the effects of this parasite on the common bumblebee Bombus terrestris, and find it to be harmful to the bumblebees survival and an aspect of their physiology known as the Proboscis extension response.

Whilst we know a lot about the foraging preferences of honey bees, little is known about the foraging preferences of bumblebees. In this new study, we show that whilst the majority of foraging bumblebees are generalists (feeding on both pollen and nectar), some bumblebees do specialise on only foraging for pollen, and some specialise on nectar. Believing this may be linked to the different sizes of bumblebee foragers that a colony produces, we set about looking for relationships between this foraging preference and the body size, fat content, sucrose sensitivity and ovary size of the workers.

To learn more about this work, which was led by Dr Adam Smith (now at George Washington University), please click here

Today has been the final day of the International Congress of Entomology, held in Orlando Florida.

The first thing i must say, is this was a HUUUGE event! Far bigger than any other conference i have attended. There was a total of 6,682 delegates from 102 countries! Spread over a large venue, it really was a race to get to the different talks in time with 10’s of talks taking place at any one time it took most of a morning to plan each day! The topics were diverse across the entire diversity of insects (as you can imagine), and frustratingly, but maybe not surprisingly, many of the bee talks weren’t necessarily near the rooms where the parasite or microbiome talks were being done! That couldn’t stop me from being excited to be there though and see as many talks as i could! I should also mention that i was there, in part, because of the generosity of the ESA who kindly awarded me an Early Career STEP travel award to attend and present my work – THANK YOU ESA!

In the session hosted by Dr. Hollis Woodard, Dr. Quinn McFrederick, and Dr. Theresa L. Pitts-Singer. I presented my work looking for links between the population genetic structuring within a host species (bumblebees) and their gut microbial community structure. Its a rather large dataset and I was only able to present a select few of the findings. Nevertheless, it was well received and i’m excited to get it published soon! No doubt so is my supervisor on this project, Dr. Seirian Sumner!

Well, somehow in between all the talks and the running around i was able to meet some great new friends, many of whom i’ve read a lot of their awesome work! Also, i got the chance to catch-up with post-docs and supervisors of christmas past! A postdoc from my time at the University of Leeds, Dr. Adam Smith, is about to publish some bumblebee behaviour work we did together from our time at Leeds, which is fantastic! and Dr. Seirian Sumner will shortly become a reader at UCL!

Overall it was the most exhausting conference i’ve been to but certainly worth it for all the cool new science i got to see in addition to new contacts made and old ones renewed. And wheres the next one? back in Helsinki!

Over the past year I have helped Dr. Scott McArt from Cornell University to get preliminary data and write an NIH grant to investigate the spread of parasites in wild bees. It has now been confirmed that the 5 year, $2 million grant has been awarded!

The grant also includes Professor Steve Ellner and Professor Chris Myers (both at Cornell), Professor Lynn Adler at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Dr Rebecca Irwin at North Carolina State University; and Dr Quinn McFrederick University of California, Riverside.

Over the course of the grant, we will look to model the transmission of parasites by developing a technique that looks at broad traits shared among species. Such techniques are a growing trend among community ecologists but have never been used with pollinators and plants. This method will simplify how data are processed; traditional taxonomic approaches consider the relative importance of each individual bee and flower within an ecosystem to tease out patterns of interactions and transmission.

The results will help inform land managers, farmers, landscapers and others which wildflower traits promote bee health and which may spread disease.

Back from a great time at the European IUSSI meeting, hosted by Professor Lotta Sundström in Helsinki. Despite the rather gruelling travel from California, that included a rather long layover in Russia, its been a great meeting! I have attending the IUSSI meets fairly regularly since the first year of my PhD and its nice to have so many friendly faces in one place!

I presented some of the Work i have been doing with Dr. Quinn McFrederick and Dr. Sandra Rehan, looking at the microbiomes of wild bees and their associations with bee collected pollen. It led to some really interesting conversations and hopefully some follow-up collaborations – which is brilliant!

On the last day, Dr. Sophie Evison and I hosted a session on shared parasites in social insects. Kicking off with the ever-lively and passionate Rob Paxton speaking about pathogen spillover among bees, we then heard from Robyn Manley about her interesting findings on the virulence of virus in bumblebees under food stress. On to Matthias Fürst with a peek into his work on the extraordinary diversity of viruses identified in ants using an siRNA technique. Closing the session we heard from Francisco Davila and the bacteria identified in the reproductive organs of mated and virgin queen ants!

That was however, just one of 27 great sessions, and another great conference! Despite the journey, i’m sure ill be back for the next one! :)

The bumblebee industry relies heavily on pollen to feed the bees. This pollen is harvested from the legs of honeybees then fed to bumblebees. The problem with this is that it may contain parasites that are infective to bumblebees!

By working in collaboration with one of the largest global suppliers of bumblebees (Biobest), the English regulating body (Natural England), the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, and funded by NERC, we move a step closer to reducing parasite spread in bees! This new article details exactly how much of the different, know parasites, are found in pollen intended for bumblebee feed. Then, we test how abundant these parasites are when the pollen is treated with sterilisation processes including Gamma irradiation and a new ‘O-zone sterilisation’ technique. Finally, we feed bumblebees the different pollens and monitor their survival and physiology.

The results of this directly inform Biobest and other bumblebee breeders on what methods better maintain parasite free bumblebees, thus reducing the potential for global parasite spread.

The deformed wing virus (DWV), known to be ubiquitous in honey bees, has now been detected in bumblebees. In addition, the neogregarine Apicystis bombi has been discovered to be more prevalent than previously thought. Here, we assess for the first time the lethal and sublethal effects of these parasites during single and mixed infections of worker bumblebees (Bombus terrestris). Overall, we find that A. bombi exhibits both lethal and sublethal effects. DWV causes lethal effect and may reduce the sub lethal effects imposed by A. bombi. The results show that both parasites have significant, negative effects on bumblebee health, making them potentially of conservation concern

I have recently completed a review of research looking at disease in wild bees that are near managed honey bees and managed bumblebees.

In this work, I list the problems managed bees cause with specific examples from America, Asia and Europe and based on the evidence, suggest what practices could reduce the harm managed bees do to wild bees. We recommend first that the safety of bee transport be improved by employing rigorous disease screening of bees and creating unified international regulations to prevent the movement of diseased bees. Second, we advise that the mixing of managed bumblebees with wild bees should be prevented by using nets over glasshouses containing managed bumblebees. Finally, we recommend an increased conservation effort to limit the effects of managed bee use in areas suffering wild bee declines.

In this review I also give an overview of the history of the commercialisation of bumblebees – a relatively new industry.

Today some more of my research was published. In it I show that diseased bees deposit parasites on to the flowers they visit. These parasites can then infect healthy bees visiting the same flowers, or be transported by an unsusceptible bee species to other flowers to reach their host species.

I allowed bumblebees from hives infected with three different bumblebee diseases to forage on a patch of flowers in a flight cage for a period of 3 hours before removing them from the cage. Then I released disease-free honey bees into the cage and allowed them to forage for a further 3 hours on the same flowers, as well as a patch of uncontaminated flowers which were brought in at the same time. Immediately afterwards, the shared flower patch, the honeybee only flower patch and the honey bees were all screened for the bumblebee parasites with alarming results. All three of the parasites were detected on the shared flowers, while two out of three were detected on the flowers which only the honeybees had access to, as well as inside the honeybee colonies.

The experiment was repeated using honeybees from hives infected with two honeybee diseases and disease-free bumblebees and yielded similarly worrying results. Both parasites were found on the shared flowers, as well as on the flowers which only bumblebees had access to, and one of the two parasites was detected inside the bumblebee colony.

The study also compared how two different flower types aid the dispersal of bee parasites, and found that bell shaped Fairy’ thimble flowers contained higher parasite loads than more open Pansy flowers. This is likely because the bees spend more time in contact with bell-shaped flowers than they do with more easily accessible open flowers.

These results suggest that flowers play an important role in the transmission of diseases between bees.

“The upshot of this is that a range of parasites in diseased bee populations, such as infectious imported bees, may spread to wild bee populations that forage on the same flowers. On a wider level, flowers as parasite hotspots suggests that areas where there is a lot of pollinator traffic per flower, for example areas with low flower density, may have high parasite dispersal between pollinators compared to areas with low pollinator traffic per flower, such as flower rich areas.”

Today I join the labgroup of Quinn McFrederick at the University of California, Riverside. The McFrederick lab studies interactions amongst the microbiota of wild and solitary bees, with the goal of determining how these interactions affect host phenotype. This research dovetails with my background on bumblebee parasites and their effect on the bumblebee. We will spend the next 2 years bringing these research themes together as we study wild bees in California.

I’ve had a great time being part of the Sumner lab at the University of Bristol but as my contract comes to an end, I have accepted a position at the University of California to work with Quinn McFrederick looking at symbionts in wild bees.

Bristol has provided me with a wealth of experience looking at next generation sequence data and getting to grips with some of the latest bioinformatics programs. In addition, I’ve met and learnt from some amazing scientists at Bristol.

This list should give an idea of the diversity of experiences I’ve had in my year at Bristol:

SUPER-B brings together scientific and societal communities involved in the conservation and sustainable management of ecosystem services mediated by pollinators. This week we addressed the growing issue of non standardised disease screening in wild pollinators. In attendance were over 20 researchers of bee disease and we spent the week going over screening methods and technologies to try to increase conformity amongst researchers across Europe.

Its been an interesting week and meeting colleagues new and old has been a lot of fun!

I’ve had a great evening at the NERC awards. Whilst I didn’t win, I came runner-up which means I get funding to continue researching threats commercial bees may pose to wild bees…and I got a cupcake!

In my category of ‘Early career impact’, Professor Hannah Cloke won for her work developing new techniques and methods to forecast flooding. The award evening, hosted at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, was a huge networking event with key industrial partners attending and provided a platform to launch the NERC 50th anniversary year, celebrating half a century of ground-breaking science.

Natural England has now completed reviewing the responses to our recent public consultation on the licensing of the release of non native bumblebees for the purposes of crop pollination and research. Currently the release of these commercially reared pollinators is permitted under Natural England’s class licence WML-CL22. Defra and Natural England wish to see the use of native commercial bumblebees as the default position for growers and researchers in England.

In light of the risks identified in the recent risk assessment on the release of non native bumblebees, the ability of the bumblebee producers to rear native bumblebees and the fact that many growers have already switched to using native hives, Natural England has decided not to renew class licence WML-CL22 for 2015. The majority of the respondents to our consultation also supported the move to greater use of native bumblebees.

Some respondents did tell us of their concerns about the bumblebee industry not being able to supply enough native bumblebees at the right time to ensure crop pollination. We consider that good forward planning by the industry, suppliers and growers will address many of these concerns. However, we have decided that in the unlikely situation that there is a shortage of native hives we will issue an emergency class licence which will permit growers and researchers to release non native bumblebees when it is not possible to obtain native hives.

Growers and researchers who wish to release non native bumblebees in any other circumstances will need to apply to Natural England for an individual licence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act. Applicants will need to demonstrate a clear need to release non native bumblebees, rather than native bumblebees, as part of the licensing process.

How this change will work

Class licence WML-CL22 will cease on the 31st December 2014. Those few growers who are still using non native bumblebees in January to March 2015 may continue to use them so long as the hives were introduced into the greenhouse / poly-tunnel before 1st January 2015 – ie there will be no need to remove non native hives which are already in use on the 1st January.

With the termination of WML-CL22 all growers and researchers who had previously registered to release non native bumblebees, and had kept this registration active by sending in annual licence returns, will no longer be registered to release non native bumblebees. However, it is still a condition of class licence WML-CL22 that growers and researchers need to send in a licence return if they released non native bumblebees during 2014.

If growers and researchers need to make use of the 2015 emergency class licence they will need to email or ring NE’s Bristol office (contact details will be provided on the class licence which will be available on the government website) at the time that it becomes apparent that their suppliers can not provide them with native hives. It will no longer be possible to register to use this emergency licence at the start of the year in anticipation that a supplier may have difficulty providing enough native hives. The following information will be required:

Address where non native bumblebees will be released, including site post code

Provide a short description of the site – greenhouses, poly-tunnels or both

Crops which will be pollinated by the non native bumblebees

If for research use – the nature of research to be carried out using non native bumblebees

Explanation as to why native commercial bumblebees were not available and the actions taken to obtain native hives.

Natural England will review the use of this emergency class licence to ensure that this is only being used in genuine emergencies. We will take account of the situation that some growers will be in pollination service agreements and may not be able to terminate these agreements. In these circumstances we will seek the reasoning from these service providers as to why they have been unable to supply native hives.

I’m delighted to find out that I have been shortlisted for the NERC Early Career Impact Award!

NERC is the UK’s main agency for funding and managing research, training and knowledge exchange in the environmental sciences. To mark its 50th anniversary, NERC are hosting their inaugural Impact Awards. The awards recognise and reward NERC-funded researchers whose work has had substantial impact on the economy and society.

My shortlisting is as a result of the work i have been carrying out during and since my PhD, investigating the threats to conservation that the importation of commercially reared bumblebees pose to native bumblebees and honey bees.

I now will have an interview in January followed by an award ceremony where the winner and runnerup will be announced. As part of the ceremony a short video of my work will be shown which will be filmed in December (not a great month to show bumblebees!), so that’s all very exciting and ever so slightly nerve wrecking!!

Today i was delighted to be part of an important work group to discuss the role of ‘omics data in assessing adverse effects of chemicals in the environment. The current approach to assessing adverse effects of chemicals in the environment is largely based on a battery of in-vivo study methods and a limited number of accepted in-silico approaches. For most substances the pool of data from which to predict ecosystem effects is limited and often only short term data are available. The EC Scientific Committee Consultation paper ‘Addressing the New Challenges for Risk Assessment’ (2012) highlights some of the main deficiencies of current risk assessment approaches.

The workgroup brought together experts from the academic, industry and regulatory authority communities to discuss and define the role of ‘omics’ techniques as part of the AOP framework to support environmental risk assessment of chemicals, especially those used in consumer products.

It was a very busy day with much discussion with great people and the production of a large body of collaborated knowledge. We hope this will be converted in to a short review on the future of the AOP framework. watch this space!